Help this site to grow by sending a friend an
invitation to visit this site.

CFD News by Email

Did you know that you can get today's CFD Review headlines mailed to your inbox?
Just log in and select Email Headlines Each Night on your User Preferences page.

SU2 Version 4.1 Released

Posted Sun January 10, 2016 @08:13AM

The open-source SU2 package for CFD analysis and design serves not only as a useable example to computational scientists, but also as a common baseline for future development by the entire community. The current open-source model has enabled the leading experts across many technical areas, anywhere in the world, to work together in creating new capabilities that would not have materialized in the absence of collaboration. Today, we demonstrate this once again with the release of SU2 version 4.1 "Cardinal."

Through collaboration with the SciComp Team at TU Kaiserslautern, we are proud to introduce the support of Algorithmic Differentiation (AD). Based on new datatype and MPI interfaces, this enables exact derivative computations throughout the code. Internally, the implementation uses the recently released open-source library, CoDiPack, to store the partial derivatives of all occurring operations and to evaluate the final gradient information. Modern C++ features, like static polymorphism and expression templates, in combination with advanced AD methods (preaccumulation, externally differentiated functions, reverse MPI communication) result in a low memory footprint and fast evaluation times.

As a first important application, AD support was used to implement a discrete adjoint solver for the Euler, Navier-Stokes, and RANS equations. Exploiting the abstract iterative structure of the available solvers in SU2, we have achieved a truly automatic extension to new solver features, while still guaranteeing fast convergence to the exact gradients. But most importantly, it is easy to use and extensible to new physical models and objective functions. Learn how to get started with these new features in the SU2 documentation.

SU2 v4.1 has a number of notable new features, such as the following:

Algorithmic Differentiation for exact derivative computations throughout the code.

Discrete adjoint implementation for the Euler, Navier-Stokes, and RANS equations.